Medical mentor team heads to Afghanistan

Six years have gone by since that clear September morning when the nation watched in horror as the towers fell and we lost thousands of moms, dads, husbands, wives, daughters and sons.

This past September, the first group of kids who were not yet born on Sept. 11, 2001, enrolled in school.

Since 9/11, a vast majority of the country has either known somebody or knows somebody who knows somebody that has been overseas defending our country's freedom in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

However, unless that service member was family or a close personal friend, people are limited to getting their information regarding these fronts of the war on terror from the media in various forms.

My goal is to provide you with firsthand accounts of how things are really going overseas and attempt to give you a glimpse of what our military personnel encounter on a day-to-day basis, not only with mission-related information but the behind-the-scenes challenges of being in a foreign land thousands of miles away from our homes and our families.

My name is Doug Lowery, and I am a first lieutenant in the Army Reserve. I live in Newville, a typical Cumberland County small town about 35 minutes southwest of Harrisburg nestled between Carlisle and Shippensburg.

I was recently activated in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and will deploy to Afghanistan in mid- to late-December for approximately one year, assigned to an embedded transition team.

Our job will be to train the Afghan security forces, which consist of the Afghan National Army, National Police and the Border Police in various areas  depending on our own military and sometimes civilian jobs and responsibilities  with the objective of getting the Afghan forces to the point where they are fully capable of securing their own country allowing American and fellow coalition forces to withdraw and come home.

I am the team leader for a medical operations mentor team consisting of two Medical Service Corps officers, of which I am one, and five combat medics. We call ourselves the Misfits because during training we were lumped together with three other two- or three-man teams in order to make up the ideal sized 16-man training unit.

As reservists, we bring a wide variety of experiences and skills to our mission. Including in my team are dads, husbands, sons and single soldiers. Professionally we have a prison guard, a registered nurse, a professional piano tuner and musician, a social worker, a phlebotomist (trained the medical specialty of drawing blood) and me, a community recreation director for the Manheim Central School District area.

Our personalities as diverse as our chosen professions, which has been a challenge dealing with the many different types of people.

We have just completed a 60-day training for transition teams at Fort Riley, Kans., the training home for all Army transition teams.

Over the past 60 days my team of misfits received training in many different areas including mounted combat patrols; foreign weapons familiarization, including the AK 47 which is the weapon of choice of both the Afghan security forces and our enemies; language training; cultural awareness; communications equipment; weapons certification on various US weapons including the M9 hand gun, the M4 rifle, the 50 caliber and M240 machine guns and the Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher, combat life saving medical training and driver's training  just to name a few.

The role of the transition team mentors is not to do everything for the Afghans but rather to guide and coach them to do things for themselves.

Our team is headed for the southeastern portion of the country somewhere in the Gardez area. However, like everything else in the military, our exact location is subject to change.

Over the next several months I will provide updates describing our mission and experiences to give you the opportunity to gain a better perspective on what is happening overseas and how my team deals with situations we will encounter that at this point we can not even imagine.

Since this posting was written in mid-December, Doug Lowery has departed for Afghanistan via Kuwait.

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